The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In a traditional model of selling goods and services, the seller identifies to prospective buyers the identity of the service or good for sale and the price of the good or service. However, in opaque transactions, some merchants allow a buyer to submit a conditional purchase offer for a travel item without specifying the full identity of the item to the buyer before the offer. An example is the NAME YOUR OWN PRICE conditional purchase offer service commercially available from priceline.com LLC of Norwalk, Conn.
With this service, a conditional purchase offer is communicated by computer and specifies an offer to buy a travel item at a particular price if certain conditions are satisfied. The certain conditions relate to various attributes of the travel item that the buyer wishes to buy. In response to receiving the conditional purchase offer, a merchant computer selects an available travel item to allocate to the conditional purchase offer. Example systems for processing conditional purchase offers are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,993,503, 7,516,089, 8,548,871. Other relevant implementations may include those in which the specific travel item is not disclosed prior to purchase, without regard to whether the customer specifies the price or the system specifies the price; that is, in some instances the service provider may disclose the price of an unspecified item.
The use of a conditional purchase offer provides multiple advantages. By submitting a conditional purchase offer, buyers are be able to purchase items at lower prices than otherwise possible. Additionally, sellers appreciate the fact that a buyer is unable to discover the identity of the item or the lowest price that the seller is willing to accept for the item until after the buyer's offer has been submitted.
However, one drawback of a conditional purchase offer system is that, in some cases, sellers cannot recognize or reward certain buyers who have previously purchased a travel item from the seller. A related technical problem is that the server computers that form part of the seller's service are required to send an excessive amount of information over data networks even to the user computers of users who have previously engaged in transactions and therefore are more likely to complete a new transaction. For these user computers, network bandwidth is wasted, and more CPU cycles and memory allocation is necessary at the server computer, to undertake a fully opaque transaction when these user computers could efficiently participate in a partly opaque or non-opaque transaction under specified conditions.